Kandao Uses AI to Bring Super-Smooth Extreme Slow Motion to Video

Kandao, makers of the Obsidian and QooCam line of 360 and VR cameras, has just released software that enables video shooters to take normal video and slow it down by up to 10X while looking still looking smooth. The catch is that the software only works with Kandao cameras — for now.

It’s easy to spot poorly-edited video when an editor takes standard frame rates and just changes the speed in Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro X. Footage looks choppy and awful. Kandao’s software helps that out by using machine learning to fill in the gaps in the footage so that it doesn’t look awful. Depending on the original frame rate the video was shot in, you can even get some insane results, such as footage slowed down to look as if it was shot with a 1200 fps capable camera.

The magic, Kandao says, comes from it’s machine-learning and neural networks to create smoother interpolated frames compared to existing software, such as Twixtor, which uses optical flow technology. There are some limitations of course. In the video at the top of this post, if you look closely you can see some artifacts in slowed down video (occasionally, the squirrel seems to lose a foot) but it’s certainly light years beyond the jerky results from just hitting the speed controls, and most normal viewers won’t be watching that closely to spot the changes. Kandao’s software will also allow you to carry over this slow-motion effect into 360 video as well.

The other benefit of the software is that hardware requirements are fairly modest - an NVidia 900-series video card with 4GB of memory is the baseline. While the software is currently only for Kandao cameras on Windows only, a Mac version and support for footage from more non-Kandao cameras is coming, the company says. The version for Qoocam is available right now, and software for the Obsidian models should be available by April 23.